For more information about any of these texts, contact Derek Christian Quezada Meneses, USC Libraries Rare Book Librarian.
Le Throsne du destin, auquel chacun peut voir sa bonne ou mauvaise fortune en jettant un, ou deux, ou trois dez communs, sur quelz points quilz se puissent recontrer.
Maître C. Coturier, Paris 1632
USC Special Collections GV1303.C68 1632
Le Throsne du destin is a seventeenth-century game book on vellum. Players cast dice to learn which of the game’s one hundred and sixty-four bawdy and scandalous fortunes – divided in half by sex (women’s fortunes on the recto side, men’s on the verso) – would be their fate. USC’s newly acquired copy of this remarkably unique manuscript includes the original bone dice necessary to play the game.
De spectris, lemuribus et magnis, atque insulitis fragoribus, variisque praesagitionibus, quae plerunque obitum hominum, magnas clades, mutationesque imperiorum praecedunt, liber unus. In tres partes distributes. Omnibus veritatis studiosis summe utilis.
Ludg. Batav. Apud Jordanum Luchtmans, Bibliopolae, 1687
USC Special Collections BF1445.L38 1687
De spectris was one of the most frequently printed and translated Protestant texts dealing with the supernatural in the early modern era. The Zwinglian theologian Ludwig Lavater (1527-1586) wrote De spectris to provide rational and theological explanations for the era’s superstitions. Lavater dismissed ghostly apparitions as misunderstood natural or psychological phenomena or as deceptions of the devil in line with Reformation theology. USC’s copy of De spectris belongs to the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library.
